For over 20 years, painter and filmmaker Pieter Schoolwerth’s work has addressed the ways in which the ever-changing and often invisible forces of abstraction in the world, which can be associated with the digitization of more and more aspects of experience, affect the task of representing the human body. Schoolwerth has developed an expanded painting practice incorporating photography, image processing, inkjet printing and relief sculpture that can be said to echo the compression of space and time paradigmatic of communication today, in an effort to depict the human figure in virtual space – a world "once removed" from itself, in which the body is present through being absent. The talk will be followed by a conversation with artist and SVA Art History faculty member Lorne Blythe (MFA 2010 Photography, Video and Related Media). Presented by BFA Visual & Critical Studies.